I need some help/insight on the notification system in OBS.
I wrote a tiny perl module as a notification plugin to replace
Hermes (we only have very modest needs for notifications at
Packman, Hermes is both overkill and barely documented).

Where specifically do you think its barely documented? Maybe I can
improve... Not because I want to convince you of Hermes, but
still...

You know what, "contributing" should be renamed to
"installation" :)))

I never read that page which, indeed, contains most of the
installation routine (I added/clarified a few minor bits).

Cool, I take that as a compliment, thanks ;-)

One thing is a bit unclear, or annoying, so to say: hermes has
its own user database with its own set of users, and as no one
is using iChain any more, and probably barely anyone who's
running OBS and Hermes has an IAM setup as on opensuse.org, we
need to duplicate each user manually from the OBS database to
the Hermes database (and have two independent passwords).

I doubt that we can use the same database for both OBS and
Hermes, as I'm not sure the tables are compatible (but I could
check in the code), and I guess that db:migrate on one side is
going to blow up the unknown tables (OBS db:migrate killing the
hermes tables, and the other way around).

Yes, that's a long outstanding bug. The prefered solution should be that
Hermes connects to a master user database, the OBS one in this case or
any other one. A slim connector would be great and should be doable
without abstraction KungFu.

I had Hermes running for close to 2 yrs with a very simple LDAP bind() call to
check if the credentials were right against a LDAP server. But users had to
first "Register" themselves before attempting a login to Hermes. I never rolled
it out for production use!

Recently, after having a chat with Klaas on IRC, I was motivated enough to
replicate OBS' LDAP authentication code to Hermes. But later realized that all
that might be needed was to pass the credentials to the OBS API - just like the
webui does. From what I understand, OBS Webui is just another Rails app that
authenticates the user via the API using ActiveXML. So Hermes could use the
same technique, right?

I still don't understand ActiveXML completely. I would still like to give this
a shot!

Any comments or suggestions on this idea?

<snip>

After putting it into BSConfig.pm like this:
our $notification_plugin = "notify_email";

and restarting the srcserver, all I get into the log file is a
SRCSRV_START. I did create a SR but nothing happened.

And it still doesn't tell me why those darn events aren't handed
out to my very simple notification plugin :)

Do you see any errors in src_server.log? (Basically, from BSNotify::loadPackage)